Rebecca is a Quaker living in Atlanta with her wife, two dogs, and cat. She is an aspiring children's librarian.

Hi, Rebecca! Can you tell me a little bit about your religious background growing up?

I grew up super fundamentalist, almost Quiverfull, and am now an atheist Quaker. My wife and I were married under the care of our Quaker meeting a few weeks ago.

I feel, so often, that I have lost too many years by not having come out as transgender earlier in my life, yet the past also feels brief and momentary, the present ever-present. Everything becomes a moment.

The world feels like it has gotten at once bigger and smaller, with all these transitions.

Hi Kellee! Can you tell me a little bit about your religious background growing up?

I consider my relationship with Christianity brainwashing, which may sound severe, but it felt that extreme to me. We attended an Assemblies of God/non-denominational church for a while, but my family is devoutly Black Southern Baptist.

Jadai Bergolla Echevarría Alonso is an emerging fiction writer and personal essayist whose topics of interest include Latinx-American rights, the Latinx diaspora, feminism, human rights, and diversity in media. She is left-handed and really wants the world to know that left-handed scissors are a damn joke. She also spiritually identifies with Oscar Isaac's mustache.

Amy Mihyang Ginther is a professor at UC Santa Cruz. She is founder and owner of Vocal Context, where she runs workshops that empower women and people of color in their communication skills. She has contributed to Transracial Eyes and Modern Loss. Amy does not live with her two cats and wants to know if you're gonna eat that.

Hi, Emily! Can you tell me a little bit about yourself before we get started?

I grew up Catholic in the Philippines. Loved reading the Bible (mostly for the Old Testament stories though. My favorite book was probably Tobias, but I couldn't tell you why) and I really wanted to be an altar girl until I got in trouble and my mom told me I couldn't do it anymore, which made me sad.

I grew up in Utah County, Utah, where the population is 75% Mormon. My family was staunchly LDS and I was a good, card-carrying LDS girl until I was 22, and then I formally left the church (submitted a letter in writing to have my name removed from the records, although I am certain they just moved my name to a black folder in a filing cabinet that's on fire).

Growing up is just a cumulative series of realizations that don’t stop until your brain does. I realized I was an atheist when I was fourteen. I realized I was asexual when I was nineteen. And I only started to realize the connections between the two when I was 28.

Hi, Emily! Can you tell me a little bit about yourself before we get started?

Here's some quick summary info:
- Emily, 32, trans (I am a literal infant when it comes to being a woman, only two months old!!), gay
- Grandparents and extended family are all fairly religious (I think everyone is Lutheran), though neither my parents or my mom's siblings are particularly religious.

Every Sunday afternoon for two or three years, my parents took a long drive across town to attend Chinese church.

We were guests in the building, renters. The hymnals and Bibles of the church’s own congregation stayed in the pews. Every week, an usher hauled in the church’s box of books, with the name of our church written in marker.

Sometimes I suspected we were guests in Christianity, too.

When I was seventeen, I attended a lock-in hosted by my church’s high school youth group. For those of you who did not participate in Christian youth groups as youngsters, a church lock-in is essentially a big supervised slumber party that usually takes place on church grounds. It’s not that different from any other slumber party attended by teenagers since whenever sleepovers became a thing: there’s pizza, snacks, music, movies, and a general lack of…

My mother thinks I’m going to hell. That it is a real place (though not, she would qualify, full of brimstone; her idea of hell is dark, and chaotic, and utterly without God). My grandfather, when he was in hospice care, said between labored breaths how glad he was that all of his four grandchildren had made their Profession of Faith. He said about his daughter-in-law, my aunt, “I believe she knows the Lord, but…